I love murder mysteries & history. Preferably in the same book.
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Why is it that I have to learn from a murder mystery that there were several "whites only" gay bars in San Francisco? Not a single history I have ready of gay bars in SF mention that fact explicitly.
Since Cynthia Shanmugalingam was a young girl, she has worked to piece together her sense …
I was so looking forward to making some Sri Lankan food but sadly this book does not deliver on that end. For example, the author writes so beautifully of Neer mor which is a yoghurt based spicy drink that you consume in summer and then the recipe that follows is not for Neer mor but for a labneh like dish "similar" to Neer mor. I never knew what was for breakfast/lunch/dinner but also didn't know how these dishes were supposed to be eaten. They looked like plates you get at a 5 star restaurant and not like a filling meal.
Additionally, this book requires fresh grated coconut for almost all its recipes which makes sense but also I wasn't in the vicinity of a store with that which made it really hard to find a recipe to cook with. Oh well.
An irresistible literary murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a …
I don't understand why I do this to myself. I always end up reading a whodunnit that tries to be so smart that it fails miserably. I really wanted to yank the collar of the author by the end (if you get to it, you will know why).
This book even got a NYT author profile!! I cannot even. www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/books/dann-mcdorman-west-heart-kill.html
It’s a hot and sticky Sunday in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Glory has settled into her …
Lovely southern mystery featuring a crotchety old lady who loves thrifting and her daughter who investigate the apparent suicide of a nun. Mystery is predictable but lovely descriptions of Louisiana, the racism that intersects with pollution, and almost no copaganda (except for a brief description of romance with a police officer).
Content warning Describes vaguely how the book ends
The author used to organize for prison abolition and his sci-fi novel is based on a future world where people in U.S. prisons are asked to choose to participate in a death match that is streamed live all over U.S. It was hard to read at the beginning because of all of the gory descriptions but once I got through that it was a very entertaining but tragic tale of how violent our current systems are and how much worse it can get.
Even though I know about how prison officers wield power in prison, every time I read about what they do, it feels new every time to read how stark the contrast in power is. This book is as good as they are saying it to be. I hope it gets made into a big Hollywood movie. There is so much here that was gripping from the beginning to the end.
I kept wishing for the book to end more positively than it did. Maybe that is sadly as far as we can get to.
The author provides great tools to observe how the sun, wind, water behave in your local environment and use that to guide how to conserve water, naturally cool your house, and get maximum solar powered electricity. I realized my home can easily save at least 1,000 gallons of rain water! Rain water is the purest form of naturally occurring water and it is pretty wild that we let it run off into sewage.
Look at the author's work here: dunbarspringneighborhoodforesters.org Pretty amazing how much greenery has been created in a desert.
Pretty great overview of how to minimize energy use in the guise of rainwater harvesting. Really looking forward to Volume 2 and 3! The author lives in Tucson, Arizona and made their street a green oasis through thoughtful rainwater harvesting. dunbarspringneighborhoodforesters.org
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …
Too many superfluous comments about "blue eyes" of characters that turned me off.
Had a lot of hard to find ingredients for the recipes :(